Summer - it's that lazy, hazy
time of year, and in some areas of the country, the emphasis
is on the hazy with sky-rocketing temperatures, ozone alerts
and poor air quality.

The Commerce
Department's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's
is leading a multi-organization effort to study movement of airborne
pollutants in the Nrtheastern United States, and what meteorological
conditions contribute to this region's poor air quality. NOAA's
largest research vessel, Ronald H. Brown, will be based
in New England waters this summer to monitor the region.

"With the combined capabilities
of several NOAA research laboratories
and our university colleagues, we have assembled the most complete
package of atmospheric gas and particle sampling instrumentation
ever deployed aboard Ronald
H. Brown," said Tim Bates from NOAA's Pacific
Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle. "These measurements
should give us a much better understanding of the transport and
transformation of pollutants in this region."

The New England Air Quality Study
will enhance current research of New England's air quality through
the AIRMAP
project. For the past three years, AIRMAP has been taking pollutant
measurements from monitoring stations located in three rural
sites in New Hampshire. The ship and plane will be used as additional
monitoring sites, offering the advantage of mobile platforms.

"We have been sitting in
a stationary area measuring what is coming to us. With the ship,
aircraft, and additional ground instrumentation, we'll be able
to go upwind and tell what is in the air coming our way,"
Talbot said.

"The plane has the ability
to sample over a broad range of distances and can look vertically
in the atmosphere," said Peter Daum, the lead investigator
from Brookhaven. "This lets us understand how these pollutants
are distributed in space and how they relate to the sources of
these pollutants."

Understanding what particulates
and gasses are being transported to New England is essential
to understanding the entire picture of air pollution in the region.
By collecting measurements from aircraft flying directly over
pollutant sources, the scientists will learn about what is coming
from outside the region, such as from the Midwest or Mid-Atlantic
states and from urban areas such as Boston and New York.

"A review of air pollution
episodes in New England suggests that blobs of polluted air often
lurk in the Gulf of Maine during the summer months, causing high
pollution levels in coastal areas," said Jim Meagher of
NOAA's Aeronomy Laboratory.
"The sophisticated instrumentation on board NOAA's research
vessel gives us just the tools we need to better understand the
sources and fate of this pollution."

Information gathered from the
ship will be extremely helpful in understanding the sea-breeze
effect, which can change the chemistry of the air and potentially
make it less polluted. According to Talbot, this effect occurs
during the summer when air flows inland due to heating of the
air over land, and then gets pushed back out to the sea when
cooling occurs later in the day. The only way to determine the
sea breeze effect is to monitor the air off the coast at different
locations. A mobile research platform such as a ship is ideal
for these applications.

The New England Air Quality Study
will be very visible, involving instrumentation and experiment
stations set up throughout the New Hampshire seacoast region.
The 274-foot Ronald H. Brown off the coast and residents
and visitors might also notice the research plane flying overhead.
NOAA's Environmental Technology Laboratory will set up a Doppler LIDAR at
Rye Harbor State Park for observation of sea breeze. An array
of seven integrated wind-profiler systems will be deployed at
various sites in New York and New England. These systems, which
measure wind and temperature, will help document the transport
of pollution into and out of the Northeast.

NOAA is dedicated to enhancing
economic security and national safety through the prediction
and research of weather and climate-related events and providing
environmental stewardship of our nation's coastal and marine
resources.